Why is this site ranking so good?
-
Site in question: http://bit.ly/aBvVbm
Our main competitor in the UK seems to be ranking extremely good for the keyword "jigsaw puzzles" even though their linking profile doesn't seem all that great?
They mainly have site-wide links on 2 of their other ecommerce sites which seem to be given them their ranking power as this equals to 100's of links.
Does sitewide links on 2 sites really give this much ranking power or am I missing something?
-
So you're saying, the 4 things you mentioned are the major factors for the site ranking?
-
My response is....
I give ZERO weight to the domain being 12 years old. NONE. Whether a domain is 12 weeks old or 12 years old has absolutely no direct consideration in rankings.
Indirectly, the longer a domain has existed the more time it has had to earn links and that is an advantage, but the domain age in and of itself is not a factor. If you bought a domain 12 years ago and let is sit parked all that time and began to use it now, you would not have any advantage over a new domain in SERPs.
I appreciate your perspective Rhys but I disagree with it. For me, the rankings make perfect sense, and apparently they do for Google as well. In my experience you are overlooking the major factors which are readily apparent while looking for explanations in less obvious and less important factors. You are welcome to disagree in which case I am not able to help. Perhaps someone else will share some the feedback you prefer.
-
I know that there are over 200 rankings and that the weight of each is unknown BUT on a logical level, the things you stated wouldn't give that much of a ranking power.
Lets be honest, the things you stated are some of the easiest things to manipulate and change for a website to benefit so it's very unlikely they would have much power.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying what your stating is wrong or that it's bad advice (because it IS good advice). Just saying that because I don't want it too look like I'm getting mad at you haha.
I do agree the domain is extremely helpful and like someone else mentioned having a store up and running for 12 years, is very trustworthy.
Therefore, it's main power ATM seems to come from it's links... which comes back to my original question.. is it those 2 sitewide links giving it the most juice?
-
There are over 200 ranking factors and not all of them are known. Even for the ones which are known, the specific weighting is not known. I can easily name off dozens of other ranking factors which I did not check, but then again I did not need feel the need to based on seeing the above major factors which are so clear and obvious.
-
While those are rankings factors, surely they aren't responsible for such good rankings?
-
Add to that the fact that the domain has some good age. It was registered on 27-Sep-2000, so it is a 12 year old domain to be precise.
-
Our main competitor in the UK seems to be ranking extremely good for the keyword "jigsaw puzzles" even though their linking profile doesn't seem all that great?
Before even thinking about a linking profile, take a look at the site and onpage factors.
1. The domain name is jigsawpuzzlesdirect.co.uk, a partial match domain name with the first two terms in the domain name.
2. Their page title is "Jigsaw Puzzles Direct - A huge range of jigsaws, jigsaw puzzles, mind puzzles and accessories for all ages that you can buy online." It's not a great title, but it begins with a match to the phrase and contains another match to the phrase.
3. The H1 tag on the page is Jigsaw Puzzles
4. The very first words of content match the search term: "Jigsaw Puzzles Direct have made buying a jigsaw puzzle online easier than doing one! "
There are certainly opportunities for them to improve SEO but the above factors are very strong. How does your site compare on these factors? I would not even think about links until you addressed the main factors above.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Page Rank Flow
I wonder if someone can help me understand clearly page rank flow. If we have a website with a Home page, Services, About and Contact as a very basic website and the page rank will flow to each of those pages from the Home page (i'm not including internal linking between pages or anchor text from the home page content - this is a question purely about home page flow via the main navigation). If the Services page had 3 drop down pages. Would the home page rank also flow to each of these or is it going to the Services page which then distributes it to the three drop down. So instead of Home page rank flowing to 3 pages 33% each - it is flowing to 6 pages 16.6% each. Or is it flowing to 3 pages - 33.3% then the Services pages get a third of 33.3% ->10.1% I know this is simplifying it all a great deal- but it is the basic concept I am trying to grasp on this simple example. Thanks
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
Similar pages on a site
Hi I think it was at BrightonSEO where PI DataMetrics were talking about similar pages on a website can cause rankings to drop for your main page. This has got me thinking. if we have a category about jumpers so: example.com/jumpers but then our blog has a category about jumpers, where we write all about jumpers etc which creates a category page example.com/blog/category/jumpers, so these blog category pages have no index put on them to stop them ranking in Google? Thanks in Advance for any tips. Andy
Technical SEO | | Andy-Halliday1 -
Is good webhosting and CCL Certificate, improve website Ranking?
I am wondering if good web hosting and CCL certificate help website to rank? any Idea!
Technical SEO | | AlexanderWhite0 -
My site is not being regularly crawled?
My site used to be crawled regularly, but not anymore. My pages aren't showing up in the index months after they've been up. I've added them to the sitemap and everything. I now have to submit them through webmaster tools to get them to index. And then they don't really rank? Before you go spouting off the standard SEO resolutions... Yes, I checked for crawl errors on Google Webmaster and no, there aren't any issues No, the pages are not noindex. These pages are index,follow No, the pages are not canonical No, the robots.txt does not block any of these pages No, there is nothing funky going on in my .htaccess. The pages load fine No, I don't have any URL parameters set What else would be interfereing? Here is one of the URLs that wasn't crawled for over a month: http://www.howlatthemoon.com/locations/location-st-louis
Technical SEO | | howlusa0 -
Site verification in WMT
Hello all, I have a site and I want to set a preferred domain but when I do it says I need to verify my site but it gives me no ideas how to do that. I know that normally you have to do it when you set the account up but I had an analytics account for this domain first then just logged on with those details and I was in with no verification process. Cheers
Technical SEO | | jwdl0 -
Site not ranking in Google but comes up #1 in Yahoo and Bing
Hi everyone, I've been working on SEO for this site for about 2 years and for some reason the site has just tanked in google. However it shows up #1 in yahoo and bing for the same search. http://www.nfsmn.com Phrase: "commercial foundation repair mn" If anyone can shed some light on the issue I would really appreciate it. They do have a sister-site: american-waterworks.com that may be causing issues as they link a lot of content to amww but not the other way around. Thanks Eric
Technical SEO | | reynoldsdesign0 -
How long before rankings return?
We recently had a redesign of our website and moved it from a static html site to WordPress. During the development the WordPress installation sat on a sub-domain. Our programmer and designer had the privacy setting inside WordPress checked so the search engines would not crawl the pages while being developed to avoid duplicate content. Fast forward two weeks when new site replaces old. Guess what privacy setting was not fixed. So about 3 days after the site is live organic traffic drops by 80%. Do a little research and all of our great rankings are gone. Notice that our page rank is also gone...Hmm... Upon further inspection the noindex tag is on every page of the site. It's now removed and has been 3-4 days. I've resubmitted inside webmaster tools and I'm just curious what y'all think the likelihood is that everything will come back to how it was before.
Technical SEO | | jmacek070 -
Is it a good idea to make 301 from a site which you know google has banned certain keywords for to a new site with similar content
Here is a short question re. 301. I read Dovers article on how to move an old domain to a new one. Say you have been a little inexperienced regarding linkbuilding and used some cheap service in the past and you have steadily seen that certain keywords have been depreciating in the SERP - however the PR is still 3 for the domain - now the qustion is should you rediect with a 301 in .htaccess to a new domain when you know that google does not like certain keywords with respect to the old site. Will the doom and gloom carry over to the new site?
Technical SEO | | Kofoed0